Data storage systems facilitate the retention and subsequent recovery of electronic data produced by computing systems. Often, data is stored remotely from a computing system, in secondary or even tertiary storage devices. Example storage devices may include magnetic tapes, optical disks, flash memory, and so on. Data is retained for a wide variety of purposes, such as for compliance purposes, backup purposes, and so on. Once data is no longer needed to be readily or quickly available, it may be sent to archive storage or other long-term storage.
Typically, recovery of a computing environment, such as a file system and its associated data, required many steps to be performed. For example, an administrator may boot up a live CD to establish an interface, such as an ISO image, in which to restore the environment. Once running, the interface may request parameters to be entered by the administrator, such as host specific parameters (e.g., name, IP address, name of server that contains the restoration data, and so on). Once the parameters are received, the interface may request information regarding the system configuration or data set that the administrator would like to be restored (e.g., what point in time, and so on). Once receiving this information, the interface may restore the computing environment and data, as desired by the administrator. Utilization of such conventional multi-touch or multi-stage recovery techniques of a computing environment can be time consuming, costly, and resource intensive, among other problems.
There is a need for a system that overcomes the above problems, as well as providing additional benefits.